By Water & Blood

Defense of Revelation’s angels and trumpets

Nor again are such people ashamed of arming themselves against what was spoken by the holy John, thinking somehow that they can overturn the truth, not knowing that they arm themselves rather against themselves than against the sound teaching.

And they say against the Apocalypse, scoffing thus: ‘What,’ one says, ‘does the Apocalypse of John profit me, telling me about seven angels and seven trumpets?’

not knowing how necessary and profitable such things have been for the orthodoxy of the preaching.

For whatever was dark and enigmatic in the law and in the prophets, these the Lord administered through the Holy Spirit for our salvation, revealing them ‘to his servant John,’ proclaiming what was dark there as spiritual and clear here, and administering the same things for us spiritually.

And then he constructs the tabernacle from skins—skins dyed red and hyacinth and so on—in order to show that the tabernacle there is indeed a tabernacle, but awaiting the most perfect tabernacle of Christ.

For a skin comes from a body, being dead, as a shadow of a living body, in order to show that the tabernacle of God is bodies; since God tabernacles in holy bodies, the saying being fulfilled: ‘I will tabernacle among them and walk about.’

Some error, then, was going to arise among the faithful if the book had not been revealed to us spiritually, so that we might learn that there is no need of trumpets, but know that the whole transaction of God is spiritual,

so that we may not take bronze trumpets after the Jewish manner, or silver ones, but may understand spiritually that the preaching of the church is from heaven, as he also said elsewhere: ‘On that day they will sound the trumpet with the great trumpet.’

For the prophets were trumpets, and a great trumpet is the holy voice of the Lord in the Gospel. Therefore also it was given to angels to reveal to us; ‘for he will sound the trumpet,’ it says, ‘and the dead will rise.’

But if the trumpets of the angels are scoffed at among you, O these people, because they have been written in the Apocalypse, then the trumpet spoken of by the holy apostle is also scoffed at; ‘for the Lord will descend from heaven,’ it says, ‘at the last trumpet, and the dead will rise on the last day at the voice of an archangel.’

Paul therefore agreeing with the holy apostle John in the Apocalypse, what contradiction remains? And how will each error not at once be refuted, God having given testimony in each case on behalf of the saints?